PREDICTif Solutions, a Houston-based technology consulting firm, today announces its upcoming presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2015. The conference, held from October 25 to 29 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, will be a premier event for business and IT professionals to learn about Oracle technologies through the interactions with Oracle and its business partners. PREDICTif’s CEO, Jeff Huang, VP of Global Sales, Karl Harrocks and OEID Practice Lead, Jimmy Philip will represent PREDICTif at the conference, meeting customers and Oracle colleagues.“This year we are very excited to have two of our customers, Wilsonart and Cox Automotive, speak on our behalf and share with our customers and partners their successes with PREDICTif. The Wilsonart story is featured on the September issue of Oracle Profit magazine, describing the incredible journey that Wilsonart and PREDICTif travelled together to build a fully integrated EPM, BI and Big Data solution” said Huang.

“PREDICTif has built a lot of successes in our three core practices, EPM, BI and Information Discovery/Big Data last couple of years.” , said Harrocks, “We are excited to leverage this platform to share our extensive experience in Oracle cloud offerings and Big Data Discovery. Whether we’re sharing our knowledge or learning from others, it’s our continuous goal to grow as a thought leader in the age of Big Data and bring this advantage to our customers.”

Remedied performance and instability issues existed with the BI applications

Delivered a master Implementation roadmap for an enterprise BI and FPM architecture

CHALLENGES

The customer has over 25 subsidiaries, many acquired through acquisition. Each subsidiary had built out its own business intelligence (BI) and finance performance management (FPM) solutions using a myriad of BI and FPM products. As one of the leading global equipment service and pipeline construction companies, the customer faced numerous challenges related to instability, inconsistency and slow performance of BI applications. In preparation for the opportunities and demands of becoming part of a publicly held company, the customer needed to expand its BI and FPM architecture beyond the business unit level. Before further expansion could take place, the customer needed to consolidate their division level BI and FPM initiatives as well as map out a strategy and roadmap to establish an enterprise BI architecture. The existing BI systems presented numerous deficiencies in terms of people, process and infrastructure:

All its business units had their own BI and FPM technologies, support teams and project initiatives without an enterprise level governance and standard;

There was no single version of truth in terms of data on the enterprise level which rendered the enterprise level reporting and financial consolidation inaccurate and labor intensive;

The existing BI infrastructure contained a myriad of technologies and products making support and maintenance difficult and cost of ownership extremely high; and

Lack of a BI competency center rendered uneven quality of delivered BI applications that resulted in slow performance and instability.

SCOPE

Conducted a health check to identify areas of risks and opportunities, recommend remedial measures, and produce a master implementation plan and a roadmap to build an enterprise level BI architecture.

Examined existing BI infrastructure and organizations in terms of people, process and infrastructure to discover areas of risks and opportunities, and more importantly, produce a list of actionable recommendations to improve the overall BI strategy and execution;

Reviewed the existing architecture, configurations and codes;

Identified bottlenecks that were causing slow performance and instability;

Aligned business objectives and priorities with BI initiatives;

Created organizational philosophy and culture to support an enterprise BI strategy; and

Developed a master implementation plan and roadmap for an enterprise level BI architecture.

SOLUTION

PREDICTif Solutions was engaged to provide a 2-week health check. PREDICTif’s senior architects reviewed the existing BI infrastructure, made recommendations for improvement and delivered a master implementation plan for rolling out BI to the entire enterprise.

Based on PREDICTif’s standard health check agenda and customer priorities, PREDICTif and the customer created a detailed agenda before the engagement. The agenda addressed both tactical and strategic aspects of the customers business. The tactical aspects were to analyze the existing BI solutions to identify areas of risk and opportunity as well as provide recommendations on both. The strategic aspect was to understand the customer’s business priorities and deliver an enterprise BI implementation plan.

The two week agenda was filled with workshops, interviews and document reviews during which, PREDICTif’s architects met customer’s personnel from numerous areas of the business to discuss business objectives, current BI architecture and business user concerns. Conversations focused on areas such as data quality, data governance, data modeling, report requirement gathering processes, architecture, support/maintenance and technology best practices. The architects also discussed future plans, business initiatives, short term and long term business goals as well as technological direction in the BI and FPM arena.

The PREDICTif resources combined our own set of BI and FPM best practices and standards with information gathered from the discussions in order to produce a set of documents:

The tactical health check deliverable is in the form of a Microsoft Word document and a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation both of which outlined areas of opportunity, improvement and identified risks as well as the necessary steps to mitigate those risks.

In this case, the PREDICTif architects discovered that the BI architecture was not designed appropriately for the increased number of users and business cases which caused significant degradation of performance and stability;

The customer did not have a well defined data governance process that was accepted by all business units. It resulted in poor data and metadata modeling as well as an overall lack of data quality and transparency;

The architects made recommendations to improve the Bi architecture in terms of performance and stability; and

The architects applied PREDICTif developed and tailor-made data governance and data modeling best practices to the customer’s business and IT environment.

A master BI implementation plan and roadmap was delivered in order to consolidate the dispersed BI architecture as well as establish an enterprise level BI infrastructure.

The implementation plan entailed a multi-phased project plan that detailed the sequence of activities, dependencies and high-level estimate of effort as well as timelines;

It illustrated a 18-month BI architecture evolution through the phases of implementation;

The roadmap also considered the trend and best-in-class BI technologies; and

The implementation plan included the steps to establish an enterprise level BI competency center and governance process.

RESULTS

PREDICTif delivered considerable value to the customer’s return on the software and IT infrastructure investment. The health check’s findings and recommendations significantly improved both the performance and the stability of the customer’s existing BI architecture. The implementation plan provided a clear roadmap to establish an enterprise level, world class BI architecture.

The improvement decreased the rendering time of a complex report from an average of 6 min to less than 30 seconds, greatly increasing the productivity;

The upgrade and addition of hardware and software instance increased the overall uptime from 95% to that of 99% which was a requirement of the business;

The customer completed all three phases of PREDICTif’s recommended implementation plan and the overall BI initiatives continue to gain adoption and approval from the business use population.

PREDICTif delivered a scalable financial reporting solution for a leading health management services and equipment company

CUSTOMER:

A leading health management and diagnostic services and equipment company.

REQUIRED CAPABILITIES

Financial consolidation and reporting

Interactive analysis

Forecasting and Budgeting

Cognos TM1 Web

CHALLENGES

As one of the leading construction multimedia companies, this customer is faced with the following challenges: inefficient central financial reports, reliance on manual inputs, and cumbersome Excel intensive reporting tool. With financial data coming from 8 different data sources, a central reporting tool to consolidate all the reports is needed. The business is presented in six platforms and each platform gets the data from its own data source.

The chart of accounts is compiled from a string with over 20 characters. The accounts dimension hierarchy was set up in such a way as to hinder reporting leading to miss interpretation of data and errors in reports. Each of the six platforms has their own chart of accounts and reporting method making it difficult to consolidate in a single tool. Therefore, a lot of manual methods are involved in creating reports. Heavy reliance on Microsoft Excel to input budgeting data is present. As a Solution, PREDICTif Solutions proposes an end to end solution to centralize the financial reporting system to provide budgeting and forecasting for the organization.

SCOPE

The objective of the project was to deliver a solution that leveraged TM1’s in-memory OLAP capabilities and simplified the monthly financial consolidation and reporting process.

Centralized, efficient and ease of use access application which can reduce preparation time. Instead of spending time on preparing reports, users can now focus on analyzing data.

Instill ‘one version of the truth’ consolidation reporting system that can be applied to six platforms

Provide a proficient budgeting and forecasting web based process that allows users to input data at the line item level.

Give ability to end users to build and analyze reports without reliance on IT or the Accounting department

SOLUTIONS

After evaluating several world class solutions, IBM Cognos TM1 was selected for a number of reasons – one of them being that IBM Cognos TM1 provides a real-time approach to consolidating, viewing, and editing enormous volumes of multidimensional data.

PREDICTif was engaged to provide an end-to-end solution delivering 25 Cubes with dimensions ranging from 5 to 15 in order to provide Financials and Assumptions models. Changes in financial forecasts, assumption metrics and indirect expenses were made via customizable Excel templates as well as directly through the TM1 interface. Reports created both in TM1 and Excel were readily accessible through the web with no additional effort.

PREDICTif Solutions was able to create a set of multidimensional cubes utilizing OLAP technology that can dynamically slice and dice through data sources.

Design a user-friendly excel input templates which can access through TM1 web. The cubes support consolidation and reporting of both budgeting and forecasting data as well as allocation.

An automated data extraction using by TI processes (ETL) tool that can update multi dimensional cubes from 8 different data sources.

Users can use dimension editor as primary method to maintain or update dimensions that are not from the source system

Setting up different instances for security purposes and separate the finance consolidation modules, budgeting applications and compensation modules will be given access by corporate controller.

Substantially reduce time spend on creating monthly financial reports. Reports are easily access and produce with little or no reliance on the accounting and IT department.

Provide power users training and knowledge transfer to the client so they will be able to build additional reports, budget templates and forecasting procedures out of the cubes.

RESULTS

PREDICTif solutions delivered measurable results to the client. Now the client is able to provide “one version of the truth” in their reporting system. Customers can now use the centralized financial reporting cube to analyze data across six platforms and they now have an automated ETL process to update dimensions and cubes from 8 different data sources. The TM1 web based input budgeting and forecasting system also allows users across the enterprise system to input data at the line item level. The application significantly speeds up the budgeting and forecasting process and empowers users to create or modify input templates without IT department influence.

With the deployment of the TM1 solution, the number of hours spent generating consolidated financial statements were reduced considerably, allowing more time for analysis;

Multiple disparate business units were brought together under one streamlined reporting process with a standardized company-wide output;

The finance group supported and upgraded the solution and the accompanying infrastructure through its own staff, without dependence on the IT support; and

Consolidated financial reports have obtained further reach as a result of the use of TM1 web.

The Customer used an out-dated solution that was under-utilized and deficient in terms of data mining and planning automation. As a result, the business was heavily dependent upon IT for both support of its existing solution and development of new functionality when the enterprise required. The software deployed was also 2 major versions behind that of the publicly released version and had run out of vendor support. Significant growth in its Solutions business units served as a catalyst to replace its manual, error-prone, labor intensive financial reporting and planning solution with a more automated, streamlined and efficient one.

The company, comprised of multiple legal entities that span the globe, was challenged with having to manage all of its financial operations in a single, multicurrency environment. It also had needs to transform individual financial plans from a group of entities into a single, consolidated corporate level plan. All this made the existing solution severely limiting in terms of the ability to predict its revenue and costs for each of its business units.

SCOPE

Needing objective and unbiased professional advice on various EPM solutions on the market, the Customer engaged with PREDICTif who led a rigorous product selection process to ensure that they procured the right EPM product for its current and future needs. The overall goal was to assist the Customer in identifying an EPM product that met its current and future business needs:

Establish a single version of the truth and generate accurate/ up-to-date reports;

Leverage both web and Excel as available interfaces for ad-hoc analysis, interactive report authoring and viewing;

Offer an easy-to-learn and easy-to use tool that enables the business to achieve self-sufficiency; and

Ensure long term, advantageous total cost of ownership.

SOLUTION

PREDICTif led a systematic product selection process leveraging its extensive experience with EPM solutions, vertical specific evaluation criteria and its own, proprietary production selection templates to ensure a thorough evaluation was undertaken. PREDICTif led the preparation of the PoC, the coordination of the vendors and finally, the short-listing and evaluation/selection of vendors who best addressed Customer’s business requirements.

Over the course of the evaluation, PREDICTif:

Assisted the Customer in its identification of the appropriate use cases that addressed all critical business needs;

Prepared the use case documentation and accompanying data;

Worked with Customer personnel in order to facilitate software vendors’ involvement in the PoC;

Supported the Customer as needed throughout their participation in the evaluation process;

Administered the different software vendors’ PoC’s and validated their results;

Incorporated PREDICTif’s proprietary software evaluation process and compared/contrasted its weighted scoring criteria against that of the differing, competing vendor technologies;

Led vendor’ demos and meetings in an effort to contribute towards the information gathering process;

Provided cost estimates for license and implementation costs; and

Produced a high level roadmap and long term implementation plan for each technology so that the Customer understood not only the current state, but also the future vision of the chosen technology.

The PoC was conducted in parallel by three vendors over the course of a two-week period. We aggregated all the gathered information and then, used PREDICTif’s weighted software selection criteria to contrast that against the Customer’s business objectives to render an option on a best of breed solution.

After evaluating several leading vendors, Oracle Hyperion/Essbase was selected for a number of reasons:

Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software meets the key business requirements, enables the automation of planning and reporting processes and powers the finance team to perform data mining and ad-hoc analysis;

Oracle Hyperion is easy to use, easy to implement and easy to support/maintain;

It is a cost effective, high return investment, conducive to quick wins, resulting in lower total cost of ownership;

It establishes a solid platform for future reporting and analysis needs; and

Oracle utilizes updated and modern technologies, presents a strategic product development roadmap and enjoys both financial as well as organizational stability.

RESULTS

Post product selection, the Customer negotiated with Oracle and ultimately procured the Hyperion product stack including Essbase, Hyperion Financial Reporting, Hyperion Planning and Financial Data Manager (FDM). Utilizing the acquired Oracle stack of products, the PREDICTif team successfully implemented and replaced the customer’s outdated solution with that of a new one fully automating countless functions and in the process, eliminating nearly half of the Excel worksheets it previously utilized resulting in increased productivity. Additionally, PREDICTif:

Upgraded the customer’s financial reporting and analysis architecture to a modern and fully supported technology;

Increased the architectures performance resulting in a more robust and stable environment;

Eliminated a multitude of manual, error-prone and time-consuming steps resulting in a more efficient and accurate financial analysis and reporting process;

Delivered to the business users the ability to do ad-hoc analysis and create their own reports;

Delivered a solution to the business that the customer personnel were able to support and maintain without significant IT support or involvement; and

Provided the business a solution that resulted in a significant return on investment.

REQUIRED CAPABILITIES
Manage financial and operation reporting with different rules for different accounts, as well as for different business units; but with one final standardized output. Handle multiple hierarchies, centralized security and quick response times.CHALLENGES

Operating over 100 supermarkets in both metropolitan and rural areas of Texas and Louisiana, the customer faced numerous challenges related to its financial and operational reporting as the company became reliant upon an inefficient, highly customized reporting application. The application was based on an antiquated and unsupported technology, Query 2000. Further compounding the difficulties associated with reporting on a customized system was the fact that the customer had no dedicated vendor support or experienced technical resources which in and of itself resulted in multiple technical limitations:

Difficult to create and maintain the reports;

Manual process required to generate reports;

No scheduling capabilities;

Reports couldn’t be published which causes duplication and inaccurate reports;

Was difficult to modify and reuse existing report templates;

Lack of templates resulted in longer cycles to develop new reports;

Generation of reports was slow as they were directly processed out of AS400 Mainframes;

There was no alerting and bursting capability to detect and manage business significant

events;

Legacy solution was burdensome as it related to the creation of ad hoc reports;

Did not support the customer’s data retention schedule and data cleansing; and

Newly developed reports can not be tested by users to ensure accuracy.

SCOPE

The objectives were to provide the customer the capability to accurately report on a timely basis, reuse templates and achieve self sufficiency after the project.

Automate the report process and make it easy for business users to create new and ad-hoc reports;

Provide training and knowledge transfer so that business users are self independent in terms of support and enhancement; and

Implement alerting and bursting capabilities to manage critical business events and support data retention process

SOLUTION

The customer acquired IBM’s Cognos BI 8.4 and TM1 9.4 to address the constraints of the legacy solution. The IBM Cognos suite provided the customer the flexibility to generate and reuse reports as well as the ability to automate report generation and alert/burst functionality for significant events.

After a thorough vendor selection process, PREDICTif was selected to implement an end-to-end reporting solution for the customer. The project encompasses the entire life cycle of software installation, configuration, customization, testing, implementation, user groups training and knowledge transfer. PREDICTif delivered the solution under budget and before the planned completion date.

Developed a comprehensive project plan with detailed scope and timelines;

Created business requirements documentation and technical requirements documents for the project;

Installed and configured Cognos 8.4 on DEV, QA and Production with QA and production being multi-server environments to improve performance and ensure redundancy (3 application servers, 2 web servers and 1 content server);

Consolidated/replaced a quandary of spreadsheets into one single company wide data entry by utilizing TM1;

Used F5 load balancers to conduct thorough load balance and fail-over testing to ensure the performance and robustness of the BI solution;

Provided thorough documentation of all the reports and user manuals; and

Offered training to both power users and end users on Query Studio, Report Studio and Analysis Studio.

RESULTS

PREDICTif’s TM1 solution streamlines the customer’s financial and operational reporting process and enables the customer to have accurate information at hands in order to make critical and timely business decisions.

The number of hours spent generating consolidated financial statements was reduced substantially allowing more time for analysis;

Multiple disparate business units were brought together under one streamlined reporting process, with a standardized company-wide output;

The comprehensive training and detailed documentation that the customer’s personnel received equipped the customer with the knowledge to support and maintain their system with minimal assistance from its IT support; and

PREDICTif helped establish best practices and project methodology within the customer’s organization that will benefit the customer in its future BI implementation projects.

Delivered a financial reporting and consolidations solution in a multi-currency and multi-account environment

CUSTOMER:

A leading Oil and Gas Equipment services company.

REQUIRED CAPABILITIES

Financial consolidation and reporting

Finance group’s self sufficiency

User friendly interfaces

CHALLENGES

As one of the leading global equipment service and pipeline construction companies, the customer faced numerous challenges related to monthly financial consolidation processing. In preparation for the opportunities and demands of being part of a publicly held company, the customer and its 25 plus legal entities had to manage all of their financial operations in a multicurrency environment, transforming individual financial statements from a group of entities into a single financial statement. Their legacy solution which consisted of putting consolidated statements together using spreadsheets had severe limitations.

Disparate spreadsheets were not a scalable solution to implement across multiple lines of business;

Manual consolidations processes were complex, error prone and left no time for analysis; and

Currency translation with exception rates for items like intercompany receivables and common stock became a maintenance dilemma.

SCOPE

Efficiency, user-friendliness and self sufficiency were the three main objectives of this project.

Deliver a Cognos TM1 based solution to streamline the monthly financial consolidation process;

Provide a user-friendly user interface for analysis, ,reporting and dissection of data in an interactive manner; and

Establish self sufficiency so that the customer’s business users can easily support and upgrade the solution independent of its IT group.

SOLUTION

PREDICTif was engaged to provide an end-to-end solution and after evaluating several potential software vendors, IBM Cognos TM1 was selected for a number of reasons most notably, the ability to provide a real-time approach to consolidating, viewing, and editing enormous volumes of multidimensional data.

Cubes having dimensions ranging from 3 to 10 were created. GAAP entries, Eliminations and Adjusting entries were made through the TM1 Consolidations product. Reports created both in TM1 and Excel were readily accessible through the web with no additional effort.

TM1 is an in-memory OLAP server, which means that can typically respond to queries more quickly than its competing products;

By implementing TM1, the customer was able to compress the consolidations process into a matter of hours, giving analysts much more time for data analysis; and

The customer found out that it could eliminate numerous steps from the process itself further contributing towards more time on analytic activity rather than the mechanics of generating month-end reports.

PREDICTif provided a training curriculum that was tailored to the customer’s needs and culture. Power users received comprehensive technology and solution specific training and as a result, quickly became proficient enough to instruct other end users.

RESULTS

PREDICTif delivered significant value to the customer’s return on investment related to the software and IT infrastructure investment. The solution received positive feedback from the customer’s user population and significantly improved the financial consolidation and reporting process.

The deployment of the TM1 Consolidations and Reporting solution reduced the number of hours spent generating the consolidated financial reports and freed up considerable more time for analysis;

The network traffic due to large volumes of attachment in the email has decreased;

Financial analysts can generate reports and dissect large volumes of data using an interface they are familiar with; and

The customer’s finance group uses, supports and enhances the solution without dependence on the IT support.

A leading, global independent distributors of semiconductors, electronic components, and computer products to the world’s major manufacturers

REQUIRED CAPABILITIES

Single-version of truth

Interactive reporting

Operation and finance dash-boarding

Real-time data access

CHALLENGES

This multinational organization relies on the ability to quickly and accurately report, analyze, plan and forecast across its entire global enterprise. On time delivery of components to customers is a critical business event for the client and a principle reason why the client is a leading company in the electronics distribution industry.

The analysis of continuously changing operational data is routine; planning and developing “what-if” scenarios for operations and logistics must be conducted not just annually, but on a daily and weekly basis. Data from multiple sources is constantly being entered by myriad users; the data is then manipulated and accessed as orders are placed to buy, sell, and deliver electronic components around the clock through numerous global offices and warehouses.

A lack of transparency into freight data lead to significant billing allocation issues, a lack of control over expenses, and delays in internal departmental’ budgeting. The customers standard reports only enabled limited visibility into the business leaving key insights buried;

Significant opacity into actual freight costs developed because of the multiple sources and means by which charge data were handled;

There was concern over the continuity of knowledge and information at both inter- and intra-department levels. Additionally, knowledge and data sharing were limited and as a result, hindered productivity and responsiveness;

Due to the absence of a BI platform, freight and inventory levels along with their associated costs were extremely difficult to manage effectively due to the lack of real-time interconnectivity of data across departments as well as locations; and

The business stake-holders did not have visibility into the inventory and freight related data;

Accurately planning and forecasting based on available data was becoming an impossible task to accomplish because of the number of disparate data sources; and

There was increasing concern over data validity due to data opacity;

Data opacity and resulting billing problems were estimated to be costing the client one-half of a million dollars in 2007.

SCOPE

The initiative is to deliver an end-to-end enterprise performance management (EPM) solution to increase cross business unit data sharing and as a result, enhance the customer’s agility to maximize short- and mid-term market opportunities given the real-time nature of the client’s business.

Integration of the Accounting and Finance Departments with that of Operations in order to improve strategic planning, forecasting (including rolling forecast capabilities), analytics and various reporting for freight and inventory;

Establish a single version of truth by implementing a suite of tools for use in extracting, reporting, analyzing and forecasting the existing data while at the same time, compiling and cohering that data

SOLUTION

PREDICTif was chosen first to evaluate a number of technologies to be used for the initiative. After a careful product selection process, IBM’s Cognos tool set was selected due to its capabilities that allowed for real-time data drill-down and analyses, rolling forecasts, multi-level management tasking, visibility, interaction across departments and management levels.

PREDICTif then architected, designed and implemented a solution to address a set of logistics and billing related issues based on PREDICTif’ proven BI and EPM solution offerings. PREDICTif’s ability to provide an immediate implementation of Cognos TM1 mapped to a short-term scalable plan was of paramount importance to the customer as short term return on investment was a critical variable in the decision making process related to engaging with a solutions provider.

The PREDICTif team, comprised of financial and operational business experts, Data and BI solutions architects, along with PMI® certified consultants, adopted a proven project delivery methodology. The methodology consists of three main phases: Foundation, Implementation and Evolution. The Foundation Phase establishes the project readiness in terms of people, infrastructure and processes. The Implementation Phase entails a typical project lifecycle that constitutes many steps including requirement gathering, design, development, testing and deployment. The Evolution Phase establishes the customer’s self sufficiency in terms of the abilities to support, maintain and upgrade the delivered solution. The solution provided:

Real-time access to multiple data sources from a single point

Agile forecasting and reporting

Product specific drill-down capabilities

Multi-level management reach and connectivity

The interconnection of operational and financial data across multiple departments

The ability for Client executives along with managers across departments to interact and manipulate data collaboratively, approve or amend changes, forecasts, and formulate budgets in real-time

RESULTS

PREDICTif established an IBM Cognos BI and TM1 infrastructure that the customer uses to enhance their operational excellence processes in order to drive maximum business value.

Delivered an IBM Cognos TM1 user-friendly Freight Analysis Model that was first deployed on a 32-bit environment and later upgraded to a full 64-bit environment for enhanced performance;

Created a new suite of analysis, forecasting, and reporting tools providing visibility into the inventory and freight data across multiple dimensions. This transparency allows executives and managers to connect different data elements in order to meet various business needs, such as allocating freight costs to different parties as well as building strategic plans and forecasting with precision;

Offered end users the ability not only to view and analyze reports, but also to accurately view the impact of changes to freight and inventory mix and thereby create rolling forecasts to better manage operations and budgets;

Achieved improved ROI as a result of enhanced analytic capabilities, forecasting and reporting across the enterprise because the data is no longer opaque;

Ushered in a new dimension of responsiveness by delivering a flexible, real-time environment for the organization in order to perform multiple business functions and improve strategic planning in real-time for immediate and future cycles.